{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.alexander.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/newsarticles?ContentRecord_id=ABA3C296-C443-46DA-8D83-E24228BB60D1", "Politico: Alexander spearheaded Cures' EHR reform", "2016-12-09", "2016", "2016-12", "Republican", "House", "TN", "Lamar Alexander", "A000360", "www.alexander.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "Aboard Air Force One headed for Tennessee on a frosty day two Januarys ago, President Barack Obama gave Sen.\u00a0Lamar Alexander\u00a0a preview of his Precision Medicine Initiative, the plan to get genomic and other data from a million Americans to use in developing targeted drug therapies.\r\nThe Tennessean, who was about to take over the Senate HELP Committee, was a natural ally for Obama because of his own interest in biomedical innovation that grew out of years of discussions with academics from the sprawling biomedical campus of Vanderbilt University, which he has represented in the Senate since 2003.\r\nTheir work to advance Precision Medicine quickly came across a hurdle the three-term senator was familiar with: health IT. Medical information couldn\u2019t easily flow from researcher to researcher or from hospital to hospital. It was trapped within the electronic health infrastructure that the federal government had spent nearly $35 billion to build.\r\nPrecision Medicine\u2019s biggest problem wasn\u2019t obtaining genomes; it was prying data out of EHRs. To realize the program\u2019s potential, Washington policymakers needed to unlock the data and get the meaningful use incentive program \u201cout of the ditch,\u201d as Alexander said.\r\nAlexander\u2019s HELP Committee would hold a half dozen hearings on EHRs in 2015. With help from top Democrat on the committee Sen.\u00a0Patty Murray\u00a0and others, HELP crafted legislation to spur health information sharing that became part of the 21st Century Cures bill, which passed the House with 392 votes and the Senate with 94 yeas Wednesday. Obama is expected to sign it soon.\r\n\u201cI think we\u2019ll look back and see that HELP assisted the industry in making the transition from meaningful use to value-based payment incentives for health IT adoption and use,\u201d said David Kibbe, chief executive of DirectTrust.\r\nThe Senate was able to build upon EHR policies put forth initially in the House, leaving the final product deeply imprinted with Senate fingerprints.\r\nHELP Committee hearings addressed clinical usability of the technology, documentation requirements, patient access to health records and \u201cinformation blocking,\u201d all issues addressed in the final bill.\r\nExecutives from major EHR vendors Epic, Cerner and Allscripts testified before lawmakers. \u201cI certainly am pleased with the evolution of the bill and appreciate the good work and leadership of Sens. Alexander and Murray and their staffs,\u201d said Leigh Burchell, head of government affairs at Allscripts.\r\nAlexander\u2019s familiarity with EHR problems predated the Air Force One trip. He was one of six senators who\u00a0in April 2013\u00a0called for a \u201creboot\u201d of the meaningful use program.\r\nIn 2015, as Republicans retook the Senate, new developments created an opportunity. Meaningful use penalties on doctors and hospitals were starting to hit, and providers were increasingly lobbying to get relief from the third and final stage of meaningful use.\r\nHELP\u2019s hearings came at \u201cexactly the right time,\u201d said Stephanie Zaremba of athenahealth. \u201cMultiple senators called attention to information blocking behaviors in those hearings, and that spurred more changes in terms of vendors working together and dropping excessive fees than any mandates in legislation will,\u201d she said.\r\nVanderbilt is home to one of the handful of elite biomedical informatics centers in the United States, receiving millions in grants annually from NIH. It will play a major role in the Precision Medicine Initiative, including hosting the Data and Research Support Center for the PMI Cohort Program with a $.71.6 million, five-year grant. It also will have a major role in Vice President Joe Biden\u2019s cancer moonshot.\r\nAlexander\u2019s influence in the area stems from the fact that he\u2019s an old-school senator, one willing to work with Democrats. Bipartisanship \u201chas become a hallmark of his chairmanship on the HELP Committee,\u201d said Jeff Smith, vice president of public policy at the American Medical Informatics Association. \u201cHe also empowered other senators to weigh in, and that's how Sens. Cassidy and Whitehouse got involved.\u201d\r\nBill Cassidy\u00a0and\u00a0Sheldon Whitehouse\u00a0sponsored the TRUST IT Act, which would have created a star-rating system for usability, interoperability and security in EHRs. The rating system was dropped but other elements of TRUST IT made it into the final Cures bill.\r\nProblems that providers have correctly matching patients to their records \u2014 an issue dear to Sen.\u00a0Elizabeth Warren\u2019s heart \u2014 were also addressed.\r\nIn 2014, Alexander worked with Democrats on language inserted into an appropriations bill that called for ONC to create an information blocking report, and that helped kick-start industry action on the issue. Soon after its publication in April 2015, EHR giant Epic Systems announced it would drop fees for exchanging health records with non-Epic systems.\r\nAlexander and Murray also spotlighted cybersecurity in health care, creating a government task force on the issue in last year\u2019s broader cybersecurity bill.\r\nObama and Alexander met again in February, following a White House event marking the anniversary of PMI. They discussed Precision Medicine and the cancer moonshot, aides said.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.alexander.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/newsarticles?ContentRecord_id=ABA3C296-C443-46DA-8D83-E24228BB60D1"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.6328420024365187, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}